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CDS Invenio NATIVE LANGUAGE SUPPORT
===================================
Revision: $Id$
About
=====
This document describes the Native Language Support (NLS) in CDS Invenio.
Contents
========
1. Native Language Support information for administrators
2. Native Language Support information for translators
3. Native Language Support information for programmers
A. Introducing a new language
B. Integrating translation contributions
1. Native Language Support information for administrators
=========================================================
CDS Invenio is currently available in the following languages:
bg = Bulgarian
ca = Catalan
cs = Czech
de = German
el = Greek
en = English
es = Spanish
fr = French
hr = Croatian
it = Italian
ja = Japanese
no = Norwegian (Bokm虱)
pl = Polish
pt = Portuguese
ru = Russian
sk = Slovak
sv = Swedish
uk = Ukrainian
zh_CN = Chinese (China)
zh_TW = Chinese (Taiwan)
If you are installing CDS Invenio and you want to enable/disable some
languages, please just follow the standard installation procedure as
described in the INSTALL file. The default language of the
installation as well as the list of all user-seen languages can be
selected in the general invenio.conf file, see variables CDSLANG and
CDSLANGS.
(Please note that some runtime CDS Invenio daemons -- such as webcoll,
responsible for updating the collection cache, running every hour or
so -- may work twice as long when twice as many user-seen languages
are selected, because it creates collection cache page elements for
every user-seen language. Therefore, if you have defined thousands of
collections and if you find the webcoll speed to be slow in your
setup, you may want to try to limit the list of selected languages.)
2. Native Language Support information for translators
======================================================
If you want to contibute a translation to CDS Invenio, then please follow
the procedure below:
- Please check out the existence of po/LL.po file for your language,
where LL stands for the ISO 639 language code (e.g. `el' for
Greek). If such a file exists, then this language is already
supported, in which case you may want to review the existing
translation (see below). If the file does not exist yet, then you
can create an empty one by copying the cds-invenio.pot template file
into LL.po that you can review as described in the next item.
(Please note that you would have to translate some dynamic
elements that are currently not located in the PO file, see the
appendix A below.)
- Please edit LL.po to review existing translation. The PO file
format is a standard GNU gettext one and so you can take advantage
of dedicated editing modes of programs such as GNU Emacs, KBabel,
or poEdit to edit it. Pay special attention to strings marked as
fuzzy and untranslated. (E.g. in the Emacs PO mode, press `f' and
`u' to find them.) Do not forget to remove fuzzy marks for
reviewed translations. (E.g. in the Emacs PO mode, press `TAB' to
remove fuzzy status of a string.)
- After you are done with translations, please validate your file to
make sure it does not contain formatting errors. (E.g. in the
Emacs PO mode, press `V' to validate the file.)
- If you have access to a test installation of CDS Invenio, you may want
to see your modified PO file in action:
$ cd po
$ emacs ja.po # edit Japanese translation
$ make update-gmo
$ make install
$ sudo apachectl restart
$ firefox http://your.site/?ln=ja # check it out in context
If you do not have access to a test installation, please
contribute your PO file to the developers team (see the next step)
and we shall install it on a test site and contact you so that you
will be able to check your translation in the global context of
the application.
(Note to developers: note that ``make update-gmo'' command may be
necessary to run before ``make'' if the latter fails, even if you
are not touching translation business at all. The reason being
that the gmo files are not stored in CVS, while they are included
in the distribution tarball. So, if you are building from CVS,
and you do not have them in your tree, you may get build errors in
directories like modules/webhelp/web/admin saying things like ``No
rule to make target `index.bg.html'''. The solution is to run
``make update-gmo'' to produce the gmo files before running
``make''. End of note to developers.)
- Please contribute your translation by emailing the file to
<cds.support@cern.ch>. You help is greatly appreciated and will
be properly credited in the THANKS file.
See also the GNU gettext manual, especially the chapters 5, 6 and 11.
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_chapter/gettext_toc.html>
3. Native Language Support information for programmers
======================================================
CDS Invenio uses standard GNU gettext I18N and L12N philosophy.
In Python programs, all output strings should be made translatable via
the _() convention:
from messages import gettext_set_language
[...]
def square(x, ln=cdslang):
_ = gettext_set_language(ln)
print _("Hello there!")
print _("The square of %s is %s.") % (x, x*x)
In webdoc source files, the convention is _()_:
_(Search Help)_
Here are some tips for writing easily translatable output messages:
- Do not cut big phrases into several pieces, the meaning may be
harder to grasp and to render properly in another language. Leave
them in the context. Do not try to economize and reuse
standalone-translated words as parts of bigger sentences. The
translation could differ due to gender, for example. Rather
define two sentences instead:
not: _("This %s is not available.") % x,
where x is either _("basket") or _("alert")
but: _("This basket is not available.") and
_("This alert is not available.")
- If you print some value in a translatable phrase, you can use an
unnamed %i or %s string replacement placeholders:
yes: _("There are %i baskets.") % nb_baskets
But, as soon as you are printing more than one value, you should
use named string placeholders because in some languages the parts
of the sentence may be reversed when translated:
not: _("There are %i baskets shared by %i groups.") % \
(nb_baskets, nb_groups)
but: _("There are %(x_nb_baskets)s baskets shared by %(x_nb_groups)s groups.") % \
{'x_nb_baskets': nb_baskets, 'x_nb_groups': nb_groups,}
Please use the `x_' prefix for the named placeholder variables to
ease the localization task of the translator.
- Do not mix HTML presentation inside phrases. If you want to
reserve space for HTML markup, please use generic replacement
placeholders as prologue and epilogue:
not: _("This is <b>cold</b>.")
but: _("This is %(x_fmt_open)scold%(x_fmt_close)s.")
Ditto for links:
not: _("This is <a href="%s">homepage</a>.")
not: _("This is %(x_url_open)shomepage%(x_url_close)s.")
- Do not leave unnecessary things in short commonly used
translatable expressions, such as extraneous spaces or colons
before or after them. Rather put them in the business logic:
not: _(" subject")
but: " " + _("subject")
not: _("Record %i:")
but: _("Record") + "%i:" % recID
On the other hand, in long sentences when the trailing punctuation
has its meaning as an integral part of the label to be shown on
the interface, you should leave them:
not: _("Nearest terms in any collection are")
but: _("Nearest terms in any collection are:")
- Last but not least: the best is to follow the style of existing
messages as a model, so that the translators are presented with a
homogeneous and consistently presented output phrase set.
Appendix A. Introducing a new language
======================================
If you are introducing a new language for the first time, then please
firstly create and edit the PO file as described above in Section 2.
This will make the largest portion of the translating work done, but
it is not fully enough, because we currently have also to translate
some dynamic elements that aren't located in PO files.
The development team can edit the respective files ourself, if the
translator sends over the following translations by email:
- demo server name, from invenio.conf:
Atlantis Institute of Fictive Science
- demo collection names, from democfgdata.sql:
Preprints
Books
Theses
Reports
Articles
Pictures
CERN Divisions
CERN Experiments
Theoretical Physics (TH)
Experimental Physics (EP)
Articles & Preprints
Books & Reports
Multimedia & Arts
Poetry
- demo right-hand-side portalbox, from democfgdata.sql:
ABOUT THIS SITE
Welcome to the demo site of the CDS Invenio, a free document server
software coming from CERN. Please feel free to explore all the
features of this demo site to the full.
SEE ALSO
The development team will than edit various files (po/LINGUAS, config
files, sql files, plenty of Makefile files, etc) as needed.
The last phase of the initial introduction of the new language would
be to translate some short static HTML pages such as:
- modules/webhelp/web/help-central.webdoc
Thanks for helping us to internationalize CDS Invenio.
Appendix B. Integrating translation contributions
=================================================
This appendix contains some tips on integrating translated phrases
that were prepared for different CDS Invenio releases. It is mostly
of interest to CDS Invenio developers or the release manager.
Imagine that we have a working translation file sk.po and that we have
received a contribution co-CONTRIB.po that was prepared for previous
CDS Invenio release, so that the messages do not fully correspond.
Moreover, another person might have had worked with the sk.po file in
the meantime. The goal is to integrate the contributions.
Firstly, check whether the contributed file sk-CONTRIB.po was indeed
prepared for different software release version:
$ msgcmp sk-CONTRIB.po cds-invenio.pot
If yes, then join its translations with the ones in the latest sk.po
file:
$ msgcat sk-CONTRIB.po sk.po > sk-TMP.po
and update the message references:
$ msgmerge sk-TMP.po cds-invenio.pot > sk-NEW.po
This will give the new file sk-NEW.po that should now be msgcmp'rable
to cds-invenio.pot.
Lastly, we will have to go manually through sk-NEW.po in order to
resolve potential translation conflicts (marked via ``#-#-#-#-#''
fuzzy translations). If the conflicts are evident and easy to
resolve, for example corrected typos, we can fix them. If the
conflicts are of translational nature and cannot be resolved without
consulting the translators, we should warn them about the conflicts.
After the evident conflicts are resolved and the file validates okay,
we can rename it to sk.po and we are done.
(Note that we could have used ``--use-first'' option to msgcat if we
were fully sure that the first translation file (sk-CONTRIB) could
have been preferred as far as the quality of translation goes.)
- end of file -
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